Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts should reconsider her stated vow that she is not running for president in 2016, the Boston Globe editorial board said.
“And if Warren sticks to her refusal, she should make it her responsibility to help recruit candidates to provide voters with a vigorous debate on her signature cause, reducing income inequality, over the next year,” the ed board wrote over the weekend.
In the piece, the board writes that Ms. Warren or another candidate could still overcome the advantages enjoyed by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination who has been ensnared in recent weeks by controversies surrounding foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation while she was secretary of state and her exclusive use of a private email account during her time as the nation’s top diplomat.
“Fairly or not, many Americans already view Clinton skeptically, and waltzing to the nomination may actually hurt her in the November election against the Republican nominee,” the board wrote.
The piece goes on to say that the big-picture debate on financial regulation and income inequality is “what’s most at peril if the Democratic primaries come and go without top-notch opponents for Clinton.”
For his part, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is weighing a run for president on the Democratic side, took aim at some Republicans’ decrying a growing income gap between the rich and poor over the weekend while in the early presidential state of Iowa.
“How ironic since their choices led to it,” Mr. O’Malley told The Des Moines Register. “This is their theory, and we tried it for the better part of these last 30 years: Concentrate wealth at the top, take regulation out of the equation and keep wages low. So for them now to say that they’re somehow very appalled and concerned about inequality is ironic, to put it most kindly.”
But the Globe piece goes on to say that nothing about Mrs. Clinton’s record “suggests much gumption for financial reform or tackling the deeply entrenched economic problems that increasingly threaten the American dream.”
“Warren’s dedication is obvious to anyone who watched her raise funds by rallying thousands of grass-roots supporters in her 2012 Senate campaign. She should not shrink from the chance to set the course for the Democratic Party or cede that task to Hillary Clinton without a fight,” the board wrote.
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
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